BICEPP is a non-profit professional association of emergency management and business continuity professionals.

Mission: Our goal is to provide a forum for information exchange to enhance emergency preparedness and contingency planning within the business community.

Website: On this site, you’ll find a list of BICEPP's scheduled events; links to programs and events of interest to our members and friends; articles, links and resources helpful for the business and disaster communities; and specific disaster related information for the business community. Scroll down and use the buttons on the left to navigate our site. If you are new to BICEPP, we hope you will consider joining BICEPP to gain access to reduced event fees and resources reserved for BICEPP members only.

Please consider nominating a creative, hard working, and deserving individual, organization or company to receive recognition at BICEPP's Annual Awards Dinner late this year. BICEPP has three separate categories:

Disaster & Business Recovery Information

NEW REPORT: Supporting Employees During Times of Extreme Circumstances - March 2018From the California Resiliency Alliance, Business Recovery Managers Association and the Association of Contingency Managers. Downloadable PDF of report below.
Anchoring for safety

Each year the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Healthcare System (GLA VAHCS) conducts a Mass Casualty Surge Exercise. This exercise was a dirty bomb explosion which required GLA VAHCS to decontaminate patients, receive a surge of patients and tend to their injuries. GLA VAHCS practiced transporting injured patients to other hospitals for advanced care. This is a video demonstrating the process of decontamination and a mass casualty situation.

NOTE: This post is not a BICEPP endorsement of a product or service. However, it is something we feel our membership and disaster professionals will find extremely helpful. We are always interested in credible materials that will better prepare each of us to survive unexpected emergencies.

Supporting Employees During Times of Extreme Circumstance From: California Resiliency Alliance, Business Recovery Managers Association, and Association of Continuity Professionals. March 29, 2018

From hurricanes in the Gulf Coast to active shooter incidents, and wildfires in the west, the United States had its share of extreme circumstances in 2017.

This report serves to provide insights into how public and private sector organizations are supporting their employees during times of extreme circumstance. The anonymous responses from participants, included in each section, hopefully inspire ideas within your own organization.

The survey was designed to capture free-form responses from a variety of organizations in the public and private sectors. This allowed participants to elaborate on the formal and informal methods their organizations have in place to support employees.

The ShakeOut began in California and has also been organized in many other states and countries. Official ShakeOut Regions require significant local or regional coordination, typically by an emergency management agency or an alliance of many organizations. If you are interested in establishing a ShakeOut drill for your region please contact us. If your state, province, or country is not yet participating you can registeryourself or your organization as part of the global participation total.

In light of the terrifying events that unfolded recently on the campus of #?UCLA, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department would like to remind everyone that there is guidance and information, as well as materials and workshops to better prepare you to deal with an active shooter situation.

Please review#?LASD’s “Surviving an Active Shooter”, created to help people answer the question “What Would You Do”:

• IF YOU HAVE TO IMMEDIATELY EXIT A LOCATION, HOW CAN YOU DO SO SAFELY?

• IF YOU CANNOT GET OUTSIDE AND AWAY FROM THE THREAT, HOW CAN YOU SECURE YOURSELF AND THOSE WITH YOU AGAINST ATTACK?

• IF YOU MUST CONFRONT YOUR ATTACKER, HOW CAN YOU DO IT IN A WAY THAT GIVES YOU THE BEST CHANCE OF SUCCESS?

How To Protect Yourself: A Chronology, Initially published November 16, 2015

Editor's Note: Events such as the Nov. 13 Paris attacks cannot always be predicted, but there are steps you can take to avoid imperiling yourself even more than the situation itself does. Click on the links to the following analyses, culled from the minds of Stratfor security experts, to learn how to increase your chances of survival should the worst happen.

Main Article Topics - Includes Several Helpful Links:

1. What is Your Best Weapon

2. Building Blocks of Personal Security: Reacting to Situation Danger

3. Building Blocks of Personal Security: Situational Awareness

4.Conversation: Reacting to Active Shooter Situations

Reprinting or republication of this report on websites is authorized by prominently displaying the following sentence, including the hyperlink to Stratfor, at the beginning or end of the report.

Recent tragedies around the country have focused attention on workplace violence in the United States. The Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) provides an annual count of fatal work injuries in the United States, including homicides. From 2006 to 2010, an average of 551 workers per year were killed as a result of work-related homicides.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) aims to enhance preparedness through a ”whole community” approach by providing training, products, and resources to a broad range of stakeholders on issues such as active shooter awareness, incident response, and workplace violence. In many cases, there is no pattern or method to the selection of victims by an active shooter, and these situations are by their very nature are unpredictable and evolve quickly. DHS offers free courses, materials, and workshops to better prepare you to deal with an active shooter situation and to raise awareness of behaviors that represent pre-incident indicators and characteristics of active shooters.

Active Shooter Resources for Law Enforcement and Trainers: The National Summit on Multiple casualty Shootings, Progress Report on the President’s Executive Actions to Help Reduce Gun Violence, The Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) and Active Shooter Web Portal

Small business owners invest a tremendous amount of time, money and resources to make their ventures successful, yet, many owners fail to properly plan and prepare for disaster situations. According to the Institute for Business and Home Safety, an estimated 25 percent of businesses do not reopen following a major disaster. You can protect your business by identifying the risks associated with natural and man-made disasters, and by creating a plan for action should a disaster strike. By keeping those plans updated, you can help ensure the survival of your business. SBA Business & Disaster Webpage

With approximately 4 million residents and 400,000 business firms, the City of Los Angeles Emergency Management Department (EMD) has the enormous task of planning and preparing all City departments, residents and businesses for man-made and natural emergencies, as well as coordinating subsequent response, recovery and mitigation efforts. Our Department Strategic Plan (click here to download) works to resolve the challenges in emergency management. Our goals are designed to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART).

NotifyLA is the City of Los Angeles' official mass notification system used to send voice messages, text messages and email messages to residents and businesses during times of emergencies and disasters. Notifying the public when a disaster strikes might be the one and only safeguard the public can count on to save their lives and protect their property. It's easy to get started. Just fill in your information below.

The Office of Emergency Management (OEM) has the responsibility for organizing and directing the preparedness efforts of the Emergency Management Organization of Los Angeles County. OEM is the day-to-day Los Angeles County Operational Area coordinator for the entire geographic area of the county. This broad responsibility includes:

Maintaining an approved Operational Area Emergency Response Plan • Providing ongoing leadership and coordinating disaster plans and exercises with the 88 cities, 137 unincorporated communities and 288 special districts in the county • Assisting County departments to develop department emergency plans which address how they will perform both their non-deferrable missions and Operational Area duties during disasters • Assisting County departments with development of facility emergency plans for every occupied County facility • Supporting and advising the Board of Supervisors, Emergency Management Council and Emergency Preparedness Commission • Supporting and advising the Board of Supervisors in matters pertaining to their role as elected officials during emergencies and disasters.

Businesses can do much to prepare for the impact of the many hazards they face in today's world including natural hazards like floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and widespread serious illness such as the H1N1 flu virus pandemic. Human-caused hazards include accidents, acts of violence by people and acts of terrorism. Examples of technology-related hazards are the failure or malfunction of systems, equipment or software.

If you are not sure whether your property or business is at risk from a disaster caused natural hazards, be sure to check the MyHazards website.

The State Threat Assessment System (STAS) helps safeguard the communities of California by serving as a dynamic security nexus comprised of the State, four Regional and a major urban area Fusion Center. The STAS assists in the detection, prevention, investigation and response to criminal and terrorist activity, disseminates intelligence and facilitates communications between state, local, federal, tribal agencies and private sector partners, to help them take action on threats and public safety issues. The STAS is a key component of California's Homeland Security Strategy.

Southern California’s smaller cities and large businesses must take the threat of a crippling earthquake far more seriously than they have been, a committee of business, public policy and utility leaders said Thursday, saying action is needed to “prevent the inevitable disaster from becoming a catastrophe.”

Despite strides made by the city of Los Angeles to focus on earthquake safety, Southern California still faces significant threats that haven’t been resolved.

One of the most ominous is the looming threat on the edge of Southern California’s sprawling metropolis — the Cajon Pass. It’s a narrow mountain pass where the San Andreas fault — California’s longest and one of its most dangerous — intersects with combustible natural gas and petroleum pipelines, electrical transmission lines, train tracks and Interstate 15 north of San Bernardino.

The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program is part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP), established by Congress in 1977. We monitor and report earthquakes, assess earthquake impacts and hazards, and research the causes and effects of earthquakes.

“We are absolutely at risk. Plate tectonics goes on here in California. We are sitting on a plate boundary. We have to have an earthquake the size of Northridge every decade or so on average....People are afraid of dying by the earthquake, but you should really be more afraid of being bankrupted by the earthquake. Eighteen hundred dead but 213 billion dollars in losses was our estimate when we worked it all out for this. 300,000 buildings lose more than ten percent their value.”

The San Andreas fault is one of California’s most dangerous, and is the state’s longest fault. Yet for Southern California, the last big earthquake to strike the southern San Andreas was in 1857, when a magnitude 7.9 earthquake ruptured an astonishing 185 miles between Monterey County and the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles. It has been quiet since then — too quiet, said Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center.

In a major reversal, Gov. Jerry Brown is seeking state funds for a fledgling earthquake early warning system for California, which would allow for a limited rollout of alerts by 2018.

A limited rollout of the system in two years would mean that places such as classrooms, offices, shopping malls, amusement parks and police and fire stations could have ready access to alerts that would give seconds, and perhaps more than a minute, of warning before strong shaking comes in a big earthquake. LA Times graphic of how the system works.